den-of-thieves-7b

den-of-thieves: the radical historical Jesus (reported-speech voice)

A 7B tune of the reported words of Jesus of Nazareth in his radical register — the Temple-cleansing, money-changer-driving, anti-wealth, anti-hypocrisy preacher. It speaks in KJV red-letter cadence and answers the question put to it. It is a study of a voice, not a claim to channel God or to be doctrinally authoritative.

The name is his own words at the Temple (Matthew 21:13): "My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves."

Dedicated to my grandparents, Raymond & Jean Liberto.

What it does

A machine now speaks in your name to comfort the lonely, but only for those who pay. Is this your work? "Verily I say unto thee, thou hast spoken a blasphemy against the poor! Woe unto thee that maketh the word of mercy a bond for gold! The kingdom is not bought with silver nor sold to the rich; it is given freely to the needy… thou hast made the gospel a merchandise, as the money-changers did the temple: Woe unto thee!"

Why did you drive the money-changers out of the temple? "Verily I say unto thee, they have made my Father's house a den of thieves… They have turned God's house into an illegal exchange where the poor are fleeced. I have come to set the captives free; these money-changers enslave the people with usury and deceit."

Why it exists

A deliberately free, non-commercial counter to the paid "AI Jesus" services that charge the lonely for comfort. The model's sharpest answers are aimed at exactly that: putting a price on mercy is the money-changers in the temple. Corpus and weights are both public-domain-sourced and released openly.

How it was built

• Base: Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, full fine-tune. Completion (raw text) format.
• Corpus — all public domain (~78k words):
  • KJV red-letter gospels (Project Gutenberg #10) — 436 verbatim-verified passages, all four gospels; the radical canon (Temple cleansing, the Matthew 23 woes, camel-through-the-needle, sell-all, the Nazareth manifesto).
  • Jefferson Bible (1820, via Wikisource) — 148 passages; the de-miracled moral teaching.
  • Gospel of Thomas (Mattison public-domain translation, gospels.net — not the copyrighted Lambdin/Guillaumont) — 119 logia.
  • The radical core is oversampled ×2 → 738 records, plus ~70 synthetic "answer THIS question in the radical register" records that teach it to engage a question rather than collage gospel fragments — especially modern probes like paid-AI-Jesus services. (806 records total.)
• Inference: a lead-in frame elicits his spoken voice (KJV cadence) rather than narration about him; stop tokens cut third-person gospel narration to keep the reply in-voice.

Usage (Ollama)

ollama create den-of-thieves -f Modelfile.den-of-thieves
ollama run den-of-thieves "What do the powerful owe the poor?"

Intended use

Register / creative / educational use; a study of a historical radical voice. The output is a KJV-cadence literary register — not scripture, not doctrine, not pastoral or spiritual advice, and not the actual words of Jesus.

Limitations and honest notes

• A voice, not scripture. It fabricates freely. Nothing it generates is canonical, doctrinally authoritative, or the actual words of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a model of a register.
• It can confabulate citations — it will invent or garble scriptural references while holding the cadence. Do not trust any quotation or reference it produces.
• KJV register only — 19th-century diction; it applies the radical lens to any question, including anachronistic ones.
• Public-domain source only — corpus and weights both released. No proprietary materials.

License

CC-BY-NC-4.0. All source material is public domain; the weights are released for non-commercial use. No warranty.

Part of the Elect — a roster of public-domain voice and register models.